Medios de comunicación en el tratamiento informativo de una crisis sanitaria: caso Relleno Sanitario Doña Juana

Medios de comunicación en el tratamiento informativo de una crisis sanitaria: caso Relleno Sanitario Doña Juana

Researching the behavior of the media with regard to their degree of political “parallelism” becomes a way of identifying the loss of legitimacy of traditional media, in a context in which alternative information channels, such as social and digital media networks, are gaining prominence. 

As a mechanism for interpreting these phenomena, this research investigates the health problem that has impacted public opinion in Bogota and Colombia from an environmental narrative, faced with a political discourse from the government and private institutions that manage public resources from the garbage collection. 

Thinking about the effects on public health and the environment is the reason to inquire into the news of the reference written media in Colombia, namely, El Espectador and El Tiempo. For this sake, it was made a comparison in the midst of two crises at different times, 1997 and 2017, that have hit the public safety of the population that lives near the dump. This allowed, to identify an evolution of the news frames in both newspapers.